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Telling our grandchild "we did all we could" to fight climate change requires more than investing in new sources of energy

January 29th, 2014

President Obama, in his State of the Union remarks, offered the following on climate change:

Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did.

Diana Donlon, director of Center for Food Safety’s “Cool Foods” Campaign, offered a response to the President’s statement in his State of the Union address, saying, “It’s going to take a whole lot more than investing in new sources of energy to be able to look our children’s children in the eye and tell them we did all we could to fight climate change”

“Any plan that doesn’t address how we grow, process, distribute and even dispose of food isn’t being sincere about the colossal climate challenges we are facing,” said Donlon. “This is because the industrial food system--which accounts for approximately half of all greenhouse gas emissions--is rarely acknowledged as a root of the problem. What do you think we use all that energy for in the first place? The good news is that with a mix of government policies and private sector incentives we, as a nation, could decide to scale sustainable, organic agriculture and sequester up to 40% of current carbon dioxide emissions while significantly curtailing the use of even more powerful greenhouse gasses like nitrous oxide (from fertilizer) and methane (from manure lagoons).”

“Practices in the industrial food system are relying on fossil fuel derived inputs, warming our planet, and undermining our ability to be resilient in the face of an increasingly erratic climate,” added Donlon. “If the President exercises his executive power to promote a system that instead relies on the sun’s energy, builds soil health and stores fresh water, we’ll be better able to beat climate change and then we might just be able to look our grandchildren in the eye.”

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